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<p>Great news! Really good. I don't know if it's included in what
you have planned exactly but I really think a maintained set of
pages like we used to have for addon creation with examples would
really help.</p>
<p>Blessings<br>
Graeme<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 23/03/2019 21:56, Christopher
Leidigh wrote:<br>
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<div>All</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I'd like to introduce myself and at the risk of being a
bit precocious</div>
<div>for a newbie, offer thoughts on the add-ons situation. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I'm Christopher located in Providence Rhode Island south
of Boston, MA </div>
<div>in the US. I have just recently volunteered to join up
to work</div>
<div>close to full-time and at least initially focused on
add-ons. I have</div>
<div>started working with Ryan to gear up and dive into
several issues and</div>
<div>needs in this area. How I got here is directly relevant
to some of the issues</div>
<div>being raised.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I have been a Thunderbird user practically from day one.
I also have</div>
<div>setup my wife's business of 3-4 people utilizing
Thunderbird and a variety</div>
<div>of extensions. Recently the office told me something
said stopped working.</div>
<div>Since I am not in the office and was not aware of the
failing add-ons due to</div>
<div>the recent Thunderbird updates. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I started looking into things, first the add-ons and
subsequently the status</div>
<div>of Thunderbird itself. Echoing some of the other
comments in this thread,</div>
<div>I really started to worry that Thunderbird was spiraling
downward. Since</div>
<div>I have time, I cold contacted 3 separate authors of the 4
important add-ons</div>
<div>for wife's office. My experience was the following:
first, I had to find</div>
<div>how to contact them , then I had to ask and propose that
I become a co-author </div>
<div>to continue their add-ons. Fortunately all three were
open and interested.</div>
<div>Over the past two months I have updated all four for
TB60, the most popular</div>
<div>with about 9k users for TB66 with ongoing experiments for
the others. So let </div>
<div>me describe my impressions from this:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>- I did not find the type of community support sites
similar to the Visual</div>
<div>Studio Code project (been working on this for two years)</div>
<div>- Disqcus has practically no activity </div>
<div>- The MozillaZine site was reasonably active, in fact
several people were helpful</div>
<div>and working together specifically on getting some
unofficial upgrades</div>
<div>to various add-ons. This was despite the fact that the
particular board (Thunderbird builds)</div>
<div>was not for development questions.</div>
<div>- I read numerous comments and blog entries about
developers frustration </div>
<div>about the required changes and direction of Thunderbird.</div>
<div>- While the required changes for TB60 were relatively
straightforward, the</div>
<div>implied requirements for TB68 appeared significant , but
most importantly</div>
<div>completely ambiguous.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>My next step was to reach out to get a better idea of
what's going on and</div>
<div>look into helping out for all the reasons above. Here
are several of the areas</div>
<div>Ryan and I have been discussing working on:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>- A "hook-up" effort/program to more efficiently and
easily join up new</div>
<div>developers with existing add-on authors not able or not
interested in supporting their </div>
<div>addons. I have envisioned both a personal (official)
effort as well as information</div>
<div>and infrastructure on the ANT site.</div>
<div>- Break-Down and analyze the state of all add-ons and
authors (Ryan has started out this)</div>
<div>- Try to get some interviews and direct feedback from
some of developers</div>
<div>- Determine any tools and infrastructure to ease the
transition</div>
<div>- Get some more regular community communication going</div>
<div>- Look at Reachout methods to encourage community
expansion (colleges, GitHub et cetera)</div>
<div>- Create a crack team for transition help (perhaps
operate as care holder authors temporarily)</div>
<div>- Continue transition documentation and examples (I have
some started on this with Thunderstorm</div>
<div>repository focusing on side-by-side legacy versus web
extension help/examples)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>There are other things as well, but I probably already
bent too many ears...</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Re: some of the options discussed specifically about out
on abandonment:</div>
<div>- I agree with the idea of retaining as many developers
as possible, not alienating</div>
<div>- I agree with the open source licenses and forking
should be acceptable without additional terms</div>
<div>- If we can do some of the items above with success
combined with coordinated efforts</div>
<div> to takeover/transition add-ons with author cooperation,
that will be best.</div>
<div>- I think it's reasonable to have a policy on both
abandoned add-ons and forked</div>
<div> projects. </div>
<div>- All add-ons should be encouraged ( required?) to be
hosted on a public repository</div>
<div>- If we have scenarios where we will remove add-ons from
the server, they should go into</div>
<div> a public repository of shelved add-ons. (I believe
there is something like this for legacy</div>
<div> Firefox add-ons on GitHub)</div>
<div>- One issue indirectly raised, but not discussed - how to
deal with developers receiving</div>
<div> donations, one could imagine some bad scenarios taking
over an add-on with money flowing.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Sorry if this was too much rambling, hopefully useful. I
am really hoping to push forward</div>
<div>on as many of the above action items as possible, but
with good agreement. I am willing and able </div>
<div>to be guided/assigned items since I do not want to
pretend to come in with a bunch of preconceptions.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Regards</div>
<div>Christopher Leidigh</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
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